Cyborg

Track notes:
Side B of a mixtape created for a Floatation Centre in Brixton called Aquatonics who wanted a mix of continuous ambient music and sounds to play to their customers that would aid their floatation trips. Recorded live on two turntables and a basic CD player with no pitch control direct to this cassette in the house I shared with fellow Openmind associates David Vallade, Mario Aguera and Chantal Passamonte (later Mira Calix). The title was coined by David and was also used as a track title on Chantal’s debut album for Warp.

This week I’ve dug out one of the original flyers used to advertise this in the Ambient Soho record shop, this was an incredibly early computer design by yours truly, probably one of the first. I think this was done on Mario’s computer at his work as we didn’t yet have one at the flat. He was a computer game programmer at that point (working on a game for Queen (the band) I seem to remember) and later worked with Hex creating visuals and animation for a game they were working on. The music selection is a pretty good representation of what we were playing at the Telepathic Fish parties at the time: The Orb(of course),Future Sound of London, Dreamfish (Mixmaster Morris & Pete Namlook), Sven Vath and a few side steps like ambient sections from ZTT and 4AD releases. We used to play bits of This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Grace Jones and there’s even a bit of U2 in there (!) There’s also a fair bit of stuff that I just cannot work out in amongst the layers so if anyone spots anything I’ve missed then please comment.

There is one particular moment that makes me cringe on this side – at the end of an Orb mix of whale noises I’m playing over the ‘Return’ mix of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’, suddenly a fairground Wurlitzer strikes up the opening notes of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’. I wasn’t paying attention whilst mixing with three decks and this caught me off guard, quickly being faded out before it could launch into full flow. It may have ruined a few floats… I used to have two copies of the Frankie tune and the intro to this mix is a lovely ambient piece before going into the full song, I would crossfade them together three of four times to extend the intro, sometimes at different speeds or pitches.

As you may have heard, Bandcamp, the online shopfront and streaming site for many independent labels and artists, have been having monthly Fridays since lockdown began where they give 100% of the revenue made to artists and forego their cut. Today is another of those days so I thought I’d compile a list of new releases and current personal favourites to check out if you can’t see the wood for the trees.

*also remember that it operates on Pacific Daylight Time which is 8hrs behind UK time. So, buy from 8am onwards in the UK up until 8am Saturday morning to maximise the support for artists and labels or check depending on where you are in the world.

I’ve structured the list Artist / Title / Label then further recommendations if the link is to a label

Howlround & Merkaba Macabre – Cantor Dust And Monster Curve (Psyche Tropes)
v. ltd. lathe cut 7″ in aid of Iklectik venue support
* this is already sold out but you can buy the digital and support by donating morehttps://psychetropes.bandcamp.com/
also check: Howlround, Sculpture

If you’re not signed up to Bandcamp it’s easy and for any purchase you make, a digital version immediately goes into your online collection whereby you can then stream on your device or to portable speakers and the like via their app. Artists can sell merch as well as physical copies of their music, you can follow them and other users and explore their collections for recommendations. Here’s mine https://bandcamp.com/strictlykev

Using the Quadraphon turntable, a customised deck with three additional arms, I remixed side D of Four Tet‘s ‘Sixteen Oceans’ album which contains only locked grooves. These grooves play one revolution infinitely, looping the sound, and played in multiple combinations with added FX you can create endless remixes. I call them ‘Phonomontages’ – two are released today via my label, Infinite Illectrik https://infiniteillectrik.bandcamp.com/

The final (I’m assured) part of the 10 Years of De:tuned release programme – after the initial ten 12″s, the special silver vinyl #10, the poster, the tote bags and the super-limited wooden slipcases for Touched Music – a repress of the entire series on coloured vinyl. Some of the originals sold out super fast and are now going for much more than anticipated so a final edition in a corresponding colour has been arranged.

Robert Fripp has been posting weekly tracks from his archives each Friday for the last five weeks under the banner ‘Music For Quiet Moments’. So far they are beautiful examples of his ambient Frippertronics style mixed with synth and strings, ranging from six minute to nearly half an hour in length.
He plans to release one a week for 50 weeks in total and on the promise of the first five alone it should be an incredible body of work. You can hear and subscribe to them on his official YouTube channel (above) or buy them direct from hisDGM site orApple Music/iTunes.

As I recall (although the memory is vague) this mix was created for a Floatation Centre in Brixton called Aquatonics, they had one in Notting Hill as well apparently. I was approached by the guy who ran it (Mark, maybe?) who wanted a mix of continuous ambient music and sounds to play to his customers that would aid their floatation trips. This was whilst I was working at the Ambient Soho record shop on Berwick St. in London and it’s possible he came into the shop to enquire. I certainly remember designing an A5 flyer that gave you £2 off your first float that we would hand out in the shop, part of which forms the inlay for this tape.

The selection is a pretty good representation of what we were playing at the Telepathic Fish parties at the time: The Orb, The Irresistible Force, FSOL, the Fax label, Global Communication, bits of This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Eno, even Grace Jones, U2 and Frankie Goes To Hollywood crept in as my meagre student budget demanded that any corner of the collection was game.

Recorded live on two turntables and a basic CD player with no pitch control direct to this cassette in the house I shared with fellow Openmind associates David Vallade, Mario Aguera and Chantal Passamonte(later Mira Calix). There are some moments that make me cringe at their out of tune-ness but mixing in key was something only Mixmaster Morris did back then, I was still very much learning my craft after years of playing hip hop and party music. I never went for a float so have no idea how this went down but they asked for a follow up mix which will appear sometime in the future no doubt. The B side of this tape, ‘Daydreaming At Night’, follows next week.

Track notes:
A live multi-deck and laptop set recorded at Shibuya FM in Toyko whilst on tour in Japan, 1996. Messy, scratchy, improvised turntable decknology mixing up ambient, jazz, drum n bass, electronica and other beats as only the Solid Steel crew can.

This was recorded on the evening of October 28th from my tour itinerary and ended a day of interviews. The itinerary says we did two sets which explains why it says Pt.1 on the tape. Not sure where Pt.2 went but I think I’ve seen the DAT of the whole thing somewhere, if I find it, it will appear here if it’s any good. The set was fun and furious and Japan was a revelation as anyone who’s been there will tell you.

This particular recording comes from a tape of a Solid Steel once we got back to the UK so I’d date the UK broadcast as somewhen in November 1996.

“Castles in Space brings you a stunning collection of new music recorded in isolation during the COVID19 lockdown – Released 29th May 2020 A total of 50 tracks across CD//Cassette//Download selected from more than 250 submissions.”CDPre-order is up now, all profits go to the Cavell Nurses’ Trust

I’m very pleased to have a track on this, a collaboration with my good friend Robin the Fog aka Howlround that we made whilst in lockdown. In fact there’s a whole album ready to go under the title, ‘The Superceded Sounds of The New Obsolescents’.

This is a compilation of 3 parts though, a CD, Cassette and Download – all with different tracks on them because of the tidal wave of submissions that flooded into the label. Cassette and DL Pre-order is here

One of the ultra-limited wooden slipcases I helped design for the De:tuned vs Touched Music World Cancer Day sale earlier this year sold this week for a whopping £450! All proceeds go to the Macmillan Cancer Trust so thanks whoever bought it. The box was one of only 15 handmade editions, this one was one of five in walnut wood, assembled and engraved by Nathandavid.design. I’m very pleased to have been involved in this project which has gone far and beyond what any of us thought it would when we started discussing it over two years ago. Stay (de)tuned for the final part of the sage next week…

As with a lot of artists on lockdown, Alan Gubby of Buried Treasure and Revbjelde has been digging into his archive and assembled a 23 track compilation of vintage analogue demos, b-sides, & library edits from cassettes, mini discs + hard drives recorded between 1982 & 2004 under the name, Zyklus. The album arrives on June 1st as a digital and CD release although the latter is limited to 100 and comes with an A5 artcard and badge. Listen and pre-order here.

Well this is a turn up for the books, PC found even more unreleased DATs from the Kaleidoscope era including a beautiful version of ‘The Crow’ that should soundtrack many a TV trailer in the future if there’s any justice.

I have this down as the first set I made for Coldcut Solid Steel in its new home at BBC London Live on 10th April 2000 – a busy month what with the release of ‘Kaleidoscope’ just a week before. We’d left KISS FM a year ago when they announced an impending overhaul of the roster, jumping before we were pushed basically. I’m sure it hurt Matt & Jon more than the rest of us as they had been with the station over 10 years and seen it come up from a pirate to a legal entity. As with everything, things had changed there as commercial concerns took over but it was strange not to suddenly have a weekly show broadcasting around London to go to.

All was not lost though, over the previous five years studio editing technology and CD-R burning had become more commonplace and we were all in the position to either record in our home studios or in Coldcut’s Ahead of Our Time set up at Ninja Tune. We’d been doing this since the KISS studios became unavailable and Matt had already set up Ninja’s first website (Don’t Believe The Pipe) and investigated early streaming technology, keen for us not to lose our weekly flow. Streaming wasn’t what it is today though, you had no idea if anyone was listening, the sound quality was terrible and the technology unreliable – it didn’t feel like being on the airwaves of a ‘real’ radio station. But, as in a lot of instances, Coldcut forged ahead and were early adopters, dragging us into the future with them.

When Ninja HQ moved from Clink St. to Kennington at the turn of the decade the studio set up changed so, more often than not, I would record sets at home and bring DATs or CD-Rs into the office for Darren ‘DK’ Knott who was now officially producing the show each week. He would organise who was playing when, co-ordinate guests, assemble each 2 hr show in time for Friday and mail out CD-Rs to stations around the world who subscribed to the weekly sessions.

When we first found out we’d got the London Live slot we were overjoyed that we’d finally, officially, be back on the airwaves. Reborn from GLR (Greater London Radio) and later rebranded as Radio London, then Radio LDN, they were having a mini renaissance with DJs like Dr Bob Jones and Ross Allen in early evening slots that were capturing the 20-30 something club goers.

Our joy was slightly curtailed when we got to the BBC studios to present the show and discovered a rather pedestrian set up with turntables over a meter apart and a broadcasting mixer fitted into the desk between them – definitely no turntable gymnastics with that set up. KISS, being a dance music station, was set up for club DJ-style sets, the mixing desk and mic one side and a table with Technics and DJ mixer the other, plenty of room and maneuverability if you wanted to plug in extra FX or move things around.

It was decided that the best way to keep doing what we did was to prepare the mixes beforehand, that way we could be as radical as we liked and not have to worry about any technological limitations. This also meant we could be a lot more creative, didn’t have to rely on one take mixes thus keeping things tighter and also overdub other tracks if need be. Things could be edited but it also meant that things generally took longer as they could be more complex than before. The mix format suddenly opened up to me because of this and I think I did some of my best work in the next decade.

By this time I was getting increasingly into themed mixes or a set with a connecting or recurring factor, I also started naming the sets as I now had years worth under my belt for Solid Steel, only identifiable by date. The theme for this mix was Brian Wilson’s odd 7” single that came free with the Beach Boys’ Holland LP,. I was deep into my BB obsession at this time, hoovering up the late 60s and 70s LP and mining them for the gems they mostly contained until they went full-cheese as disco took hold. ‘Magic Transistor Radio’ is a children’s fairy tale about a pied piper who lives inside a radio and is Wilson is full blown la-la land mode. I threaded excerpts from it throughout the mix as it was so apt, being that it took part inside a radio.

There are so many great tracks here, Broadway Project’s LP is a forgotten classic IMO, David Holmes’ Organisation-sampling ‘Living Room’, early DJ Format, Tommy Guerrero(arguably the last great record on Mo Wax), Sirconical on Twisted Nerve, 7-Hurtz on Output, Broadcast…

But I’ve gone on WAY too long with this one, have a listen and see what you think. One more thing, I was so enthused I even made a CD cover for this one, I’m sure I intended to do this with all the mixes but only managed two like this. Turn on, tune in and freak out to the Magic Transistor Radio.

A film about the different aspects of record collecting that I appeared in some years ago, ‘Circles in Squares’ has just been made available to view online. Unfortunately, one of the contributors, Naoki E-Jima recently lost his battle with cancer and any proceeds from the pay per view stream will go to Naoki’s family. It’s £4 for a 48 hr viewing window and it’s a really well made little film https://vimeo.com/ondemand/circlesinsquares

Nebari is one of the aliases of my good friend Mr Trick aka Project Fallen and he recently asked me for some images to adorn his deep ambient drone project. Just released on his OTA Recordings label via Bandcamp they are super minimal excursions for those quiet hours, the Tremorrelease focussing on sub bass.

Savage Pencil aka Edwin Pouncey has been floating in and out of my life for decades now. Whether through the Wiseblood ‘Motorslug’12″ insert, ‘Nyak, Nyak’, the Big Black sleeve for their Headache EP or Blast First‘s compilation cover, ‘Nothing Short of Total War‘. He cropped up in the NME and Sounds, doing spot illustrations for album reviews, The Wire magazine with his Primer feature collages and Trip or Squeek cartoon strip and numerous other leftfield magazines.
There he was in Knockabout Comics‘ anthologies, a page here or there in Weirdo or some long-forgotten independent zine or one-off publication. I used to see his Dead Duck comic on the spinner in Forbidden Planet and his designs for Slam City Skates in Covent Garden before going downstairs to Rough Trade where I would find obscure indie singles with his art on the covers, posters of Godzilla-like monsters behind the counter and his biker movie picture disc compilation, ‘Angel Dust’. In recent years I’d run into him at Orbital Comics, signing copies of the latest Satanic Mojo comic, the memorabilia shop in Cecil Court where he sometimes worked or at record fairs where he’d be either selling behind a stall or perusing the bins with Thurston Moore.
Eventually we met properly when I interviewed him for Rough Trade’s 40th anniversary book in 2016 and again when I spoke to both Edwin and Chris Long about their Battle of the Eyes project with the late Andy Dog in a still-unpublished interview. And now he rears his head again in Strange Attractor Press‘ excellent book of his career, ‘Rated SavX’.
This seems to be the definitive book of his work so far, lots of archive-delving has gone on here and there are many lost or unpublished illustrations from across his life whether it be black metal sleeves, fly illustrations, his punk past or his love of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth’s monster cars and cartoons. It’s all here in eye-straining detail with enough info to have you wishing you’d picked up that tiny print run publication he released all those years ago. Nevertheless, I zipped through it and now have new items on the wants list – highly recommended. There’s still time to get the limited edition hardback of this with extra (S)crapbookof unpublished roughs and Appreciation Society patch from the publisher’s website. While you’re there check the rest of their inventory, they have some fascinating books about counter culture, music, psychedelia and the occult world.

Track Notes:
Very much from a golden age of electronica (The Black Dog’s ‘Spanners’ on Warp, Gescom’s debut EP, Anthony Manning on Irdial) and trip hop (Skylab, DJ Krush, 9 Lazy 9). The spoken word that lays across Skylab’s opening track in this mix is from an odd German test pressing I found back in the 90s, full of spoken word from old gangster films. I spotted the famous Lauren Bacall line, sampled in part by Double Dee & Steinski on ”Lesson 3′ but also later used as a KISS FM jingle with the ‘blow’ substituted for ‘kiss’, and thought it would be a nice nod.

The Anthony Manning track, ‘Untitled’ (track 3) is from his excellent album, ‘Islets In Pink Polypropylene’ on Irdial, there was nothing quite like it at the time and I’m not sure there’s been much since, a lost gem. The Gescom track is from the first ever release on Skam records, which I incidentally designed the labels for, and the 9 Lazy 9 track was from their second LP which was the first cover I ever designed for Ninja Tune.
The Eon track, ‘Inner Mind’, is played on 33rpm rather than 45 intentionally as it and the track preceding it – something by Kris Needs apparently which I just can’t identify – both use the same sample.

What can be said about Florian Schneider that won’t have already been said by millions around the world? It’s no exaggeration to say that the group that he founded changed the face of music in ways that we now take for granted. The music that they went on to make broke boundaries, changed preconceptions and influenced untold artists after whilst touching on concepts years or decades ahead of their arrival in our everyday lives with albums like ‘Computer World’. Whether pushing technological boundaries, live performance or their own image as a group, they predicted the future whilst trying to escape their county’s past. Always a reluctant interviewee, rather letting partner Ralf Hutter take on those formalities, Florian often came across as the one with the mischievous twinkle in his eye for a split second when attention was elsewhere. His initial love of the flute was slowly phased out of the group’s sound and speech synthesis became his focus, something that he went on to work with after he left the group in 2008. He was a legendary figure in 20th Century music who’s contribution will never be forgotten.

In 2012 I did a month’s worth of Kraftwerk posts on this site, highlighting the most obscure sleeves, ephemera, video, graphics, reviews and tributes I could find. You can find those posts here.

Later in 2013 I did a ‘Kraftweek’ to celebrate their run of London gigs – find those here.

For all 100+ entries of Kraftwerk-related material on this site – go here.

I held off a day posting this seeing as my social media feed was crammed with Bandcamp posts, didn’t want to add to the noise. But on that note I’ve started a label on the platform, digital-only for the moment, for my multi-armed turntable experiments with. locked grooves + FX. 1st releases are up now including a couple of pay what you want freebies.

Anyway, here’s Side A to last week’s side B – the ? in the title on the tape refers to me originally not knowing the date this went out and I’ve tracked it down to approximately 21/12/97 via a series of PRS sheets I have with track lists.

This set sports two amazing remixes by Bundy K Brown – the ones with the long Cheech Wizard subtitles, a thing of his back then. Bundy (by then ex-Tortoise) was someone we’d met on our first tour of the US when we showed up in Chicago and we had enough time to hang out a bit and do some record shopping. I really rated him as a producer mainly for his stand out remix on Tortoise’s ‘Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters’ mini album and we bonded over similar musical tastes.
He turned me onto a lot of electronic jazz and used to work in the Dusty Groove record store so was steeped in digging culture. I put him up for the ‘Timber ‘remix and we resolved to work together on something (‘Full Bleed’ on the Kaleidoscope LP). I just really like his off-kilter rhythms and the cyclic nature of what he does, maybe it’s because he’s a musician approaching sampling from an engineering perspective, whatever it is he has a unique ear and years later I found out Four Tet was a fan too.

This set is such a typical mash up of the times, lots of sample-based material that flits from jazz to electronica to downright huge dirty beats by the end for Skylab and Techno Animal. Bearing in mind this was going out between 1-3am I think we sometimes pushed things to extremes but it was (and still remains) anything goes – the Broadest Beats in London, right?

Kev

BTW: the Techno Animal/Nav Katze mix at the end really goes on too long and the bass distortion near the end is on the tape.